Mixed Race Families

Britain is now a better place to grow up mixed race. But don't celebrate yet

Prejudices have receded significantly in the past 20 years, but a report out this week shows racist attitudes remain

by Lanre Bakare, The Observer, Saturday 15 December 2012

Growing up as a mixed race child, with a mother from Leeds and a father from Nigeria, my Bradford childhood certainly wasn't trouble-free. But I had the kind of relatives to see me through any tricky moments. As well as a fantastic, loving family on my mother's side, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by a strong Nigerian community, focused around a friendship club my father founded, which acted as a focal point for a small but vibrant community.

With my dad and his mates I would hear Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa spoken; I'd listen to the music of Fela, Shina Peters and Ayinla Kollington, and get to taste jollof rice, eba, moinmoin and other Nigerian cuisine. This understanding and engagement with the other side of my ancestry and culture was vital to me. It gave me confidence to fall back on when people would question who I was. Both my parents instilled the idea in me that being different was a huge positive. It was something special, that should be celebrated and cherished rather than hidden or denied.

Not everyone is so lucky, of course. But this week a report released in the wake of the 2011 census threw fresh light on mixed race relationships in the UK and the public's perception of them. And it seemed to bring good news. The census revealed there are a million people who identify as mixed race. British Future, the thinktank that produced the report (titled The Melting Pot Generation – How Britain Became More Relaxed About Race), found that 15% of the public have a problem with these relationships, compared to 50% in the 80s and 40% in the 90s.

The so-called Jessica Ennis Generation (those born in the 80s and 90s, like me) was portrayed as more tolerant of, and essentially not bothered by, mixed race families.

It followed other recent reports which claimed that mixed race people are more attractive, more intelligent and biologically superior to their single race counterparts. But have the prejudices which blighted mixed race people and couples completely disappeared over the last 20 years? Has Britain entered into a post-racial nirvana in which that kind of prejudice has all but died out?

There's no doubt that things have improved. Significantly. Sure, growing up in Bradford in the 90s I had my share of the racist incidents which many people faced – name-calling at school, being singled out by the police, and feeling like I didn't "fit in'' with my peer group. But my experiences pale in comparison to those mixed race people who grew up in the generation before mine.

A friend's father, who is also mixed race, grew up in my area a quarter of a century before.

His brother was driven to painting his skin with white emulsion paint because he was so distressed at the abuse he received. His pores became clogged and he had to be taken to hospital as his skin could no longer breathe.

Stories like that make you realise that for a lot of mixed race people, growing up in a space between two cultures was testing, isolating and painful. There is no doubt society has moved forward since then, but we should be cautious about celebrating too soon. These things are complicated.

Take a journalist colleague of mine, Joseph Harker, who has a Nigerian father and an Irish mother. He is loth to identify as mixed race and sceptical about the motives behind the recent fascination with mixed race Britain and what it represents.

Seen from his point of view, mixed race people have become the new poster boys and girls of diversity because they are seen as less threatening, more attractive, more European and in short, more acceptable.

For him the constant thematising of "mixed race Britain'' is fashionable because it makes white people feel more comfortable. In one piece Joseph wrote, he asked: "Could Barack Obama have been elected were both his parents black?"

This school of thought would contend that the feting of stars like Jessica Ennis doesn't really reflect discrimination more ordinary mixed race folk face, regardless of how successful certain athletes or musicians are. This celebration of mixed race and black athletes is not a new phenomenon.

Daley Thompson won the Sports Personality of the Year award in 1982, and that triumph was seen by some as a watershed moment for race relations that would lead the way for more acceptance of mixed race people and mixed race relationships. It didn't really turn out that way in the 80s.

Then there is the example of the French football team in the World Cup of 1998. A team which included Arab, mixed race and black players like Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, David Trezeguet, Zinedine Zidane and Lillian Thuram was used to build up the idea of a French rainbow nation, as Paris and the country at large embraced multiculturalism and its different communities.

Yet, fast forward to 2011 and the French team was embroiled in a race row after Laurent Blanc was taped discussing proposals to reduce the number of black and Arab players in the side, addressing concerns the team wasn't white enough.

At the same time France was struggling to deal with race riots, the rise of the far-right with the increased popularity of staunch anti-immigration politicians like Marine Le Pen, who just last week was in trouble for comparing Islamic prayers to the Nazi occupation during the second world war.

During the same period Britain has had to deal with the rise of the BNP and the anti-immigration agenda which continues to dominate political discourse, with Ed Miliband stating on Friday that Labour made mistakes when it came to immigration and "Britain must always control its borders".

There does seem to be a disconnect between the immigration debate and the supposed flourishing of an at-ease "mixed race Britain''. Do politicians who praise the development of a more mixed country fail to see the obvious connection between that and immigration?

Let's not be too bleak. Things have changed for the better for mixed race Britons over the last 30 years. The point is that there are still prejudices which hinder improved race relations in the UK, which affect all racial groups. I agree with Minna Salami, who runs the MsAfropolitan blog and is mixed race, when she recently said: "There's an eagerness in society to try to be approving of all, which I'm quite moved by, but there's a level of silencing when you've got white reporters claiming mixed race people are symbols of harmony when their views aren't heard."

I've also written about the need for mixed race people to become part of the conversation before, but it seems we are continually used as an example of how Britain is moving on without ever being asked about our experiences or opinion.

Before the real impact of mixed race relationships can be measured in the UK, mixed race people themselves need to become part of the conversation.

When I was 15 I was confronted in a former girlfriend's house by her father, who said: "If I had known you were coming I'd have worn my Ku Klux Klan outfit." He then asked me to leave. It felt like I'd been dropped into a scene from Rita, Sue and Bob Too, the hardcore mid-1980s film about Bradford. But that kind of blatant racism is still experienced by some people if they have a partner outside their race. In many cities there is still open prejudice towards relationships between white women and Asian men in particular.

When a friend kissed an Asian schoolmate at a sixth-form party she was branded a "Paki shagger" the next day, and that kind of language was something Asian and white friends faced regularly when they went out with people outside their race.

The past week has shown how all elements of the media, leftwing and right, tabloid and broadsheet, are keen to present the UK as a more tolerant and mixed society than we were. And, of course, it is.

But there is a danger that by simply patting ourselves on the back and believing the feelgood tale of mixed race Britain we are ignoring the reality that a lot of mixed race people face, which is discrimination, lack of understanding and prejudice.

It's still not time to crack open the champagne.

Taken from HERE.

Six Stages of the Essay Writing Process 6

Stage Six: Editing

If you were snatched away right now by aliens and never seen again, you’d still get a reasonable mark for your writing piece. It’s got plenty of ideas, they’re in the right order, and the whole thing flows without gaps or bulges. However, in the event of an alien abduction it would be comforting to know that you’d left a really superior piece of writing behind. The way to achieve this is through the last step of the writing process: editing.

What is editing, exactly?

Basically ‘editing’ means making your piece as reader-friendly as possible by making the sentences flow in a  clear, easy-to-read way. It also means bringing your piece of writing into line with accepted ways of using English: using the appropriate grammar for the purposes of the piece, appropriate punctuation and spelling, and appropriate paragraphing.

Why edit?

I’ve used the word ‘appropriate’ rather than ‘correct’ because language is a living, changing thing and the idea of it being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is less important than whether it suits its purpose . . . there’s nothing wrong with those thongs, but maybe not for a job interview! It’s all about being practical. If you use spellings that aren’t the usual ones, or grammar that isn’t what we’ve come to accept as ‘right’, it will distract your readers. Instead of thinking ‘what wonderful ideas this person has’, they’ll think ‘this person can’t spell’. It will break the trance of reading. Readers can be irritated and troubled by unconventional usage (I’ve had dozens of letters from readers about the fact that I don’t use inverted commas around dialogue in some of my novels). It’s your right to make up new ways to do things, but expect to pay a price for it. In the case of a school essay, this price might be a lower mark. (Like everything else about the English language, there are exceptions to this. Imaginative writing often plays fast and loose with accepted ways of using English in order to achieve a particular effect.)

The read-through

As with revising, the first thing to do is to read the piece all the way through, looking for problems. Make a note of where you think there are problems, but don’t stop to fix them. Once you’ve found them all, you can go back and take your time fixing each one. If there’s even the slightest feeling in the back of your mind that something might not be quite right, don’t try to talk yourself out of that feeling.

As writers, we all want our piece to be perfect, so we have a tendency to read it as if it is perfect, with a selective blindness for all its problems. For that reason, this is a good moment to ask someone else to look at it for you. To make a piece as user-friendly as possible, you need to check the piece for style, grammar and presentation.

Editing for style

You made a decision about style back at the start of Stage Four, but in the heat of the moment as you wrote your draft, style might have slipped or changed. You might have forgotten a technical term, or been unable to  think of the proper word for something, or you might have got your thoughts tangled up in long complicated sentences. That’s fine—that shows you had your priorities right: get the broad shape of the essay right first, not get bogged down in detail. But now the moment has come to get to grips with all those details of style. The main point about style in an essay is that it should always be the servant of meaning. In an essay, a style that draws attention to itself has failed. The aim of an essay is to get your ideas across strongly and clearly—the style is just the vehicle to convey the ideas.

Questions to ask about style

Have I used the style most appropriate to an essay?

• An essay should be written in a reasonably formal style. It should be in the third person or the passive voice. ‘I’ is generally not appropriate.

Have I chosen the most appropriate words for this style?

• To achieve a formal style, individual words shouldn’t be slangy or too casual. You’ll be expected to use the proper technical terms where appropriate. On the other hand, your essay shouldn’t be overloaded with pompous or obscure words. If a simple word does the job, use it.
• Does the writing give the reader a smooth ride or a bumpy one?
• In a first draft it’s very easy to get yourself into long complicated sentences containing too many ideas. This is the time to simplify them. Even if a long complicated sentence is grammatically correct, it’s generally awkward and hard to read. Try it out loud—if it’s hard to get it right, or if it sounds clunky, rewrite it. It’s much better to have two or three straightforward sentences than a big baggy monster.
• On the other hand, the ‘See Spot run’ variety of sentence gets pretty mind-numbing after a while. If you have too many short, choppy sentences you may need to look at ways of connecting some of them, using words such as ‘although’, ‘in addition’, ‘on the other hand’…
• If all the sentences are constructed exactly the same way, you should look at ways of varying them.

Go back to Stage Four to remind yourself about style.

Editing for grammar

Imaginative writing may have a little latitude with grammar, but an essay has none—the grammar just has to be right.Grammar is a big subject, and for a proper understanding of it, I strongly suggest you get a specialised book on the subject. This is a quick checklist of some of the most common grammatical problems.

Questions to ask about grammar

• Is this really a complete sentence?
• Have I joined two complete sentences with only a comma between them?
• Do my subjects agree with my verbs?
• Have I changed tense or person without meaning to?
• Is one bit of my sentence somehow attached to the wrong thing?
• Have I put enough commas in? Or too many?
• Have I put apostrophes in the right places?
• If I’ve used colons and semicolons, have I used them properly?
• If I’ve used inverted commas and brackets, have I used them properly?
• Have I put paragraph breaks in the best places?
• Have I trusted the computer grammar checker too much?

Editing for presentation

Presentation probably shouldn’t matter, but let’s face it, it does. No matter how well-researched and clearly argued your essay is, it (and your mark) will be undermined by spelling mistakes, messy-looking layout or illegible handwriting.
Questions to ask about presentation

Is my spelling correct?

• You’d think that using a computer spell checker would solve all spelling problems. However, if an incorrect spelling is in fact a legitimate word, the computer won’t always pick it up as a mistake.
• Be aware, also, that computer spell checkers may also suggest US spellings, which aren’t always the same as Australian ones, and they are very bad at names of people and places.
• If you’re not using a computer, go through your writing very carefully for spelling. If you have even the faintest shadow of doubt about the spelling of a word, look it up in a dictionary. There are certain words that all of us find hard—words like ‘accommodation’, ‘necessary’, ‘disappoint’—so if you get to a word that you know is often a problem, double-check it even if you think it’s right.
• Another reader can also be a big help in picking up spelling errors. If there are two perfectly good spellings of a word, choose one and use it consistently.

Does my layout make my piece look good?

• Layout means the way the text is arranged on the page. Layout makes a huge psychological difference to your reader. A piece that’s crammed tightly on the page with no space anywhere and few paragraph breaks can look dense and uninviting. A piece that’s irregular—different spacing on different parts, different amounts of indentation or different spacing between the lines—looks jerky and unsettling.
• Your layout should allow plenty of ‘air’ around the text, with generous margins all round.
• You should leave some space between the lines, too—not only for comments by the teacher, but also because your text is easier on the eye if there’s good separation between the lines.
• It’s just human nature to prefer something pleasant to deal with and—contrary to some opinions—teachers are, in fact, human. So make sure your piece of writing is as legible as you can make it. If it’s handwritten, write as clearly as you can and don’t let the writing get too small or too sloping. On a computer, stick to one of
• the standard text fonts (New York or Times New Roman, for example). Don’t use fancy fonts. Use 10- or 12-point type size. If your piece isn’t long enough, the teacher won’t be fooled by 16-point type. Human, yes. Entirely stupid—not usually.

Does my title help the reader enter the essay?

Your essay may have a title: The Water Cycle. Or it may have a heading: Term 2 assignment: ‘What Were the Causes of World War I?’. Whatever the title is, it should tell the reader exactly what the writing task is.

Have I acknowledged other people’s contributions to my essay?

• Most essay writers use other people’s work to some extent. Sometimes they use it as background reading. Sometimes they specifically use information someone else has gathered or insights someone else has had. Sometimes they actually quote someone else’s words.
• It’s very important to acknowledge this help, and say exactly where it comes from. This is partly simple gratitude, but it also means that other people can go and check your sources, to find out if, as you claim in your essay, Einstein really did say the earth was flat.
• You should acknowledge other people’s work in two ways: first, in a bibliography at the end of your essay. This is just a list of all the sources of information that you’ve used. List them alphabetically by author’s surname, with information in this order: author, title, publisher and place and date of publication (or the address of the website).
• As well as appearing in the bibliography, sources that you’ve used in a direct way should also be acknowledged in the essay itself—for example, ‘As Bloggs points out, Einstein was not always right.’
• The titles of any books that you refer to should be in italics (if you’re using a computer) or underlined (if you’re writing by hand).

Editing an Essay: 5 steps

1. Read the piece through

• Don’t stop to fix mistakes, just mark them.

2. Is the style okay?

Ask yourself:

• Have I chosen the style that’s most appropriate for an essay? (Remember, an essay is aiming to persuade or inform.)
• Have I chosen particular words that jar with this style? (Check for over-casual, conversational words or ‘ordinary’ words where a technical one would be more appropriate.)
• Have I chosen to construct sentences in a way that jars with the style? (Look for short, simplistic sentences, also for needlessly pretentious ones.)

3. Is the grammar okay?

Ask yourself:

• Have I written any sentence fragments?
• Have I written any run-on sentences?
• Do my subjects agree with my verbs?
• Have I changed tense or person?
• Have I dangled any modifiers?
• Have I shown the pause I intended by using commas?
• Have I used apostrophes in the right places?
• Have I used colons or semicolons correctly?
• Have I used inverted commas or brackets correctly?
• Are there plenty of paragraph breaks, and are they in the most natural places?

4. Is the presentation okay?

Ask yourself:

• Have I checked spellings? (Be careful of sound-alikes such as their/there/ they’re.)
• Is my layout orderly and well spaced?
• Have I found the best title for my piece, which prepares the reader for the essay?
• Have I acknowledged sources of ideas and information in a bibliography?

5. Print out the piece and read it through again

• Repeat the steps above, if necessary. Then print and read it again.
• If everything seems OK in the final read-through, the essay is finished.

IN THIS SERIES ABOUT THE ESSAY WRITING PROCESS:

Stage One: Getting Ideas >
Stage Two: Choosing Ideas >
Stage Three: Outling >
Stage Four: Drafting >
Stage Four: Revising >
Stage Six: Editing

How significant is a signature?

By Colm O'Regan Comedian and writer

Did Elizabeth I have more time on her hands, or have standards slipped?

A letter leaked to the press from Vince Cable criticising the government was signed off by the business secretary with a distinctive moniker akin to a smiley face. So how significant is a signature?

The odd-looking sign-off became a talking point this week, with some people joking about what it might say about Vince Cable.

Is he trying to be cool? Is he too busy?

Maybe he just likes to draw a caricature of a smiling whale at the end of his letters as a reminder to himself and all of us that we are not alone on this planet and all our decisions have impacts on the eco-system.

Whatever it is, his squiggle is sufficiently odd to have people resurrecting that old chestnut: trying to predict personality from handwriting.

I became aware of the "science" of graphology around the time I had to produce my first signature. This was when I opened my first account of any description with a financial institution.

Signing an application form for a Sammy Squirrel Savings Account in the Irish Post Office is not exactly the same as inking a merger between Glencore and Xstrata but nevertheless it was a milestone of sorts.

I didn't make what one would call a cool signature. I just wrote my name a little bit faster. And that is still the case today. Someone analysing my signature now would conclude that I've no strong feelings about anything and that I may not even be a real person.

It's too late to change now and the lack of an impressive signature has affected my life. One of the reasons why I consciously shun the fame that would have otherwise occurred as a natural result of my talent, is that it would take too long for me to sign "all those books".

As for the rest of my letters, they soon came into focus. My older brother got a book from the library about graphology and a whole new world of navel-gazing opened up. Apparently my backward slanting writing was an indication that I was too focused on the past.

That was uncanny. I did sometimes think about the day before. I started rotating my pages anti-clockwise and immediately felt the past fall like a weight off my 13-year-old shoulders.

Large loops on the below-the-line letters were, according to my brother, a sure sign of a "total pervert". I clamped down on that dark side of me straight away.

For a few weeks when nothing else was happening, I gradually addressed each aspect of my handwriting until, according to the graphology book, I was a cross between Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe and Carl Lewis.

You don't see so much about graphology now - a succession of studies in recent decades have emptied a vat of scorn over its ability to describe and predict personality, but perhaps the biggest threat to graphology is not scepticism. It is the March of Time.

With the advent of computers, fewer and fewer people are doing any handwriting beyond their middle-school years, so their penmanship isn't evolving beyond the teenage stage of development either.

This would lead graphology experts analysing future populations to conclude that most of the subjects studied are moody, hard to get up in the mornings and think their parents are an embarrassment (I know what you mean, especially when they're trying to be cool).

Against this background, future pseudoscientific analysis will have to look at our computer-based evidence in order to jump to dodgy conclusions. Take fonts for example. If you want to spot the deranged and the psychopathic now, start with anyone who types exclusively in Wingdings.

Those who employ Comic Sans are the kind of people who want to make dull activities sound fun. A Comic Sans user may also display passive aggressive tendencies particularly when highlighting falling standards in the canteen. "These cups don't wash themselves" looks cheery in A4 on the wall, but inside the author is a seething cauldron of rage.

Times New Roman? This person is a no-nonsense individual. They believe if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well and no amount of dressing it up or "design" is going to change that fact. Or it could be someone who has not worked out how to change the font in Microsoft Word.

Apart from font there are other tell-tale signs of personality traits. If someone uses lots of emoticons they're not confident in their ability to convey their meaning to others. DO THEY WRITE IN BLOCK CAPITALS followed by a parade of exclamation marks that looks like a picket fence? Then they are someone who comments on an article on a website. You can leave yours below.

READERS’ COMMENTS

9 HOURS AGO

//Apparently my backward slanting writing was an indication that I was too focused on the past.\\

Or, like me, you are left-handed and learned to write in the days of fountain pens and needed a method so that you didn't smudge what you had just written. Turning the paper clockwise 90 degrees and writing in "columns" was so much more comfortable than dislocating one's wrist, elbow and shoulder.

7 HOURS AGO

Handwriting analysis has actually been used in the corporate environment to consider whether or not a person was right for a job. Hmm, crosses his T's in a very sharp upward slant. This man is obviously psychotic and a danger to others... Please let us be rid of this ridiculous pseudo-science. You might as well judge a person's mental fitness based on his star sign.

6 HOURS AGO

Brilliant article. made me laugh. I remember being around 14 and getting caught practising my signature in school by a teacher. She told me that it showed a certain degree of self obsession. I replied that i didn't have a clue what she was on about..... I was just practising for when I became famous. - she didn't see the joke.

6 HOURS AGO

I just scribble really fast. I hate being in a queue (line) waiting for the really s l o w person to s i g n their name just right. Dotting the i's and crossing the t's. As for the 'experts'? Go get a life and put an end to your clap-trap!

5 HOURS AGO

My signature is unreadable, because I developed it in my teens and it was too much hassle to change for banks etc. I reckon you can tell that a woman is married(or using a married name) by looking at her signature as it is more likely to be readable because she developed it later in life and had time to think about taking care over making it presentable.

Taken from the BBC.